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Oct
30thNext Level : 5 Rules for a Rookie Tech Leader:
At this point in my career something weird has happened. People look at me expecting me to answer questions. They expect me to hack my way through the jungle of technology and find a path to business value. They expect me to lead. Or in other words: at sometime in the recent past, I transferred from a contributor – to a leader. But, I am not an executive or a PhD. I am not a battle hardened veteran of a dozen product launches. I am not on any boards, I have not written any books, and I do not walk into a room with every single person knowing my name. What I have done is build a reputation for executing where it is difficult. I have demonstrated my passion for technology and my love for problem solving. I have shown that I love talk to people about tech as much as building tech. And through all this I find myself in an interesting position. There is more riding on my shoulders than ever before. But more than that; there are really good, hard working, and intelligent people that are looking to me to help them achieve success. Which means I can now fail more than just my family or myself. Which is a much more serious place to be. Out of this I have been trying to ensure that I am not just the Special Forces style engineer. I do not just drop in, kill all the problems, and then [...]
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Oct
22ndHello Again : My life up to this point
This post is a catch-up for all the stuff I should have written about but didn’t in the last few weeks. For those that don’t know, I recently moved from EMC over to VMware into a brand new kind of role. Right now I am caught in the trifecta of learning a new company, meeting new teams, and trying to help bootstrap my own with recruiting and design work. Which results in my blog getting a lack of attention. But, all that is going to change. My new mission with this blog is to just start dumping from my brain a combination of what I am playing with and what I have discovered along the way. I am working on tools and special things for the cloud community at large. But these will take a bit of time to see the light of day. So my new post will be titled: “Nick’s Distractions” – and will be a summary of mildly interesting topics that distracted me somehow during my week. So here is my first catch-up: Project Razor: Razor has exploded way bigger than I expected. Funny how solving personal problems can result in public acceptance. The current forks are over 50+ and watchers are almost 200 on the github repo(https://github.com/puppetlabs/Razor). This is just awesome, as I had always envisioned Razor as being truly powerful when it becomes a part of an open community that contributes 99.99% of the code and design. Now for the updates: 1. I was lucky [...]
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Sep
13thChange of pace : My next career experiment
Every year I get a little older and a little wiser. And the one thing I am realizing about myself is that I thrive on challenges. My natural element is breaking problems down and creating answers. I live for that first 5 minutes after success when you can look back and see a pattern of effort paying off. Which is why I look back at my time at EMC and feel so good about what has happened. I have made a great many friends. I have worked with people that have influenced me greatly. I have made my small dent in the technology world where I could. And beyond all that I have had a blast doing it all. And it would be very easy to stay comfortable and contribute where I am. But, I have been presented with an opportunity to move the ball in a way I have not before. Life is a sequence of opportunities, challenges, and empty-time in between. It is how you handle each of those moments over a long period of time that shapes who you become. This new change for me is both a major challenge and an extremely important opportunity to shape who I become. Which is why I am announcing that I have accepted a position with VMware as an Automation Architect in Cloud Infrastructure and Services. This position presents some very unique challenges and I am joining an amazing team of rockstars. I have very specific challenges in this role [...]
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Jun
25thRazor OSS #2 : Public Release of MK
Shortly after the open-source release of Razor in late May, we started to see requests from users for more information about the Microkernel that is used by Razor. What distribution was used as the basis for this Microkernel? What services does it provide? What is involved in building a custom Microkernel that will support my hardware? Will the Microkernel be open-sourced as well? If so, will it be part of the Razor project or a separate (but related) project? At the same time that these requests started coming in from the Razor community, we saw our first Razor issue that was directly linked to the Razor Microkernel. The issue was with support for a networking card that we hadn’t seen before (the Broadcom NetXtreme II card) that was presenting some issues for a Razor user (The Microkernel it wasn’t checking in with the Razor server on machines that used this network card because the it couldn’t connect to the underlying network). In the end, the issue turned out to be that the firmware needed to support this network card was not included in the Microkernel (even though firmware for this card that would work with our Microkernel was readily available). Our intention all along was to make this project publically available, but we still hadn’t worked out the last remaining issues around automating the build of a Microkernel ISO from the Razor Microkernel project itself (at the time of the Razor release late last month the process of building a [...]
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Jun
5thAPI All The Things! : Razor API Wiki
I mentioned in a slightly important recent post that Razor, the new cloud provisioning tool for bare & virtual metal, has a full RESTful API. Now I back that up with some documentation. Freshly added to the Razor Wiki on github is a overview of the Razor API. This includes examples on the JSON format and code samples for Adding, Removing, Updating, and Getting Razor configuration. And I took the time to provide code samples for each section in Ruby, Perl, Python, Java, C# and PowerShell (for my PS buddies, you know who you are). Go read it here : Razor API Overview This is the tip of the spear and there will be more documents on API elements for each Razor Slice. The Razor project is in beta and so the API may change as things move forward. Also, since this is a community project. If you have ideas or code that will improve anything please fork and submit a pull request. Feedback & comments appreciated. .nick
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May
21stLex Parsimoniae : Cloud Provisioning with a Razor
Blogging has been very difficult for me over the last 4 months. My move to the Office of the CTO within EMC changed much of what I did and left me searching for content I could write about. Most of what I was dealing with on a daily basis was either too early to mention or too secret to reveal. Today, this changes with the release of a project I have spent the majority of my days and nights working on this year. Without long-worded wind up I am proud to announce the release of Razor, a cloud-provisioning tool to change the way we look at provisioning hardware for cloud stacks. Razor is a software application, which is a combination of Ruby (main logic) and Node.js (API, Image Service) for rapidly provisioning operating systems and hypervisors for BOTH physical and virtual servers. It is designed to make standing up the base substrate underneath cloud deployments both simple and transactional. Now at this point, many of you are thinking: “Great, another *cloud* provisioning tool.” And I don’t blame you at all. So what makes Razor different than many other tools out there like Cobbler, Dell’s Crowbar, or other deployment services? Just about everything. The real answer to that question is related to the reason this project is named Razor. We based much of our design theory after Ockham’s razor. It is based on the belief that OS/hypervisor deployment should be simple, succinct, and incredibly flexible. Many products out there try to [...]
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